Juho: You'd said:
>>> I meant regional proportionality (not political proportionality), i.e. >>> making the number of representatives per population equal in each area. >>> >> >> In that case, then single member districts, drawn with equal >> population, can have perfectly equal regional proportionality, as >> exactly equal as desired. So your statement quoted at the top of this >> post is incorrect. Equal district representation per person. > > In practice there will be some border drawing problems and some rounding > errors. It is not easy to draw the border line e.g. in the middle of a twin > bed > to make the districts equal in size :-). Irrelevant evasion. If the district's population is off by one person, that's nothing compared to the amount by which even the best PR system will put it off, when allocating seats to fixed districts. I've been told that, in this country, districting involves "blocks" of 100 persons (or thereabout), for purposes of census privacy. Though I don't understand whys that's needed, even that doesn't make single-member redistricting have as great differences in district representation per person as fixed district PR seat allocation would have. That said, I'll repeat that I of course fixed districts, and PR seat allocation to them, make sense as the best solution when people want to keep the historical districts. And I don't criticize your preference for keeping Largest-Remainder, for reasons of historical tradition, or even for the convenience of not advocating, proposing and enacting a different PR allocation method (Sainte-Lague) for districts. You continued: > Also if we assume that there are N seats and the population is N+1... If so, then all but one of the districts contain only one person. And the other district contains two people. That would indeed greatly violate equal district representation per person. But, actually, our districts are somewhat larger than that :-) You continued: > , one of the single-member districts will have only half of the > "representation density" of all other districts. Yes indeed. But, as I explained above, our single-member districts don't contain only one or two people. You continued: But if we divide the same country in two multi-member districts (whose sizes could be just approximately similar) we will have better regional proportionality (representation density is close to 1 seat per 1 person in both districts). [endquote] Fine.But: 1) Our single member districts aren't as small as you think they are. As of 2008, our House of Representatives Congressional districts each contained about 699, 000 people. 2) The matter is irrelevant for another reason: Changing to multimember districts would be a quite radical and unpopular change--Just as changing your distsricts to automated redistricting would be. Especially if the only justification you can come up with is that some districts have 699,000 and others have 699,001 :-) In any case, we have much more important, and much more do-able, considerations than changing to multimember districts. I'm referring to the need to fix Plurality's forced-falsification problem, a reform which is known as Approval Voting. By the way, the District of Columbia has a representative in Congress, with a population of of only about 592,000 in 2008. So you might say they're over-represented. But their representative isn't allowed to vote in Congress. So actually their voting representation is zero. But that isn't a problem of the district system, it's just a problem of how the District of Columbia is treated. Mike Ossipoff ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
